Birders again - Chilika Lake

I know you people have lost hope of being free of the bird-brain but you must have thought that you had, at least, finished with the Birders. Not really! There is more to come but, thank my kind heart, no more than this one. At least for now.

The trip to Sunderbans was followed up with a trip to Chilika Lake, some 100 odd kilometers off Bhubaneswar in Orissa. Since this is considered the largest wintering ground for migratory birds in India, it was a vain hope to avoid Birders - and, of course, birds. Not that the birds were any problem to me, in and of themselves. The problem only was that people kept asking me things like, "Did you see that bronze-skin Jacana?" and I go "Ho! Hum!" - looking 45 degrees away from where it was - only to hear a derisive laugh and the words, "That's a little egret, you idiot!" Times like that, I wished heartily that Nature had not been so creative and had stuck to making only one type of bird.

Anyway - there we were on a boat, propelled by a pole on the marshy lake with birds galore around us. Marsh Sandpipers, Black-winged stilts, egrets and herons - they were all over the place. After those days at Sunderbans of peering hopefully at the shore in the hope of finding a lone Kingfisher and jumping with joy when a distant bird deigned to make an appearance, this was boring. I mean, when there are so many birds around you, where is the excitement in sighting one?

As usual, I was wrong. When you have a plethora of birds, you apparently started looking for the ones that were not so ubiquitous and felt excited about it. So, you start looking at distant dots and scream,"There is a Brahmini duck" OR "There is an open-billed stork" and go into raptures. Soon I was into the full swing of things, clapping the guide's binoculars to my eyes and going gaga over rara avis - while concealing the fact that I could only manage to swing the binocs between the sky and the water and could sight nary a bird with it.

This was the evening of the first day. Apparently far more birds frequented the place in the morning. I went to bed with visions of shooing off the pesky pond herons and jacanas, which were too mundane to be noticed, in order to view the Grey heron and other such relatively rarer birds.

The next morning, when we went to the lake, we found that there had been a communication gap. Birds were supposed to flock the lake then but, apparently, no-one had thought to tell the birds. We found only as many birds as on the evening before. Maybe the birds thought it was a pity to have traveled so far and not take a look at the dolphins and had gone over on a sight-seeing trip.

The trip had its moments as usual. There were a couple of egrets engaged in either a mating dance or a fight (And people assure me that the two are different in humans as well as in birds. It is all hearsay evidence for me). One bird kept jumping close to the other only to have the other fly off to a different location every time. There was that Casanova of a buffalo with both a drongo and a little egret perched on its back while the others had to do with only one or none. (Did I forget to say? The locals apparently grazed their buffaloes in the lake). There were those couple of drongos ecstatically putting on a virtuoso aerial display - maybe a mating dance again or maybe they were just show-offs playing to the gallery.

We rounded off the trip with a visit to the Lingaraju tempe in Bhubaneswar - a marvelous example of Kalingan architecture. Needless to say, I prayed to be saved from the fate worse than death - of becoming a Birder!